A Cambridge University student who spoke out after being raped has praised undergraduate Ione Wells for her “great and encouraging” campaign to support sexual assault victims.
Francesca Ebel, 21, who wrote about her ordeal in her university newspaper last year, backed the #notguilty campaign after Wells’s attacker was jailed for a year.
She said: “I think there is a real power in speaking about it publicly because it’s showing that it can happen to anyone at any time and it’s a ‘normal people problem’ and people really need to wake up to that and realise that it is happening and that we need to do something about it.”
Ebel is one of dozens of victims of sexual assault who have spoken publicly about their experience after Wells, a 20-year-old Oxford University student, published an open letter to her 17-year-old attacker.
Urging other victims to summon the strength to speak out, Ebel said she believed schools should teach teenagers about “consent and responsibility and what rape actually is and how to prevent it”.
She added: “Rape is not black and white – it’s incredibly complex and can have devastating consequences whatever the situation.”
Ebel wrote last year that she was raped when she was 17 years old by a friend at a party.
Writing in the Tab student newspaper, she said she did not report the incident at the time because she feared not being taken seriously and was worried about being branded “an attention-whore” or “a liar”. Her attacker has never been held accountable for his actions.
She wrote: “I’d been too drunk and I’d been kissing him earlier in the night – surely that must mean that it had been consensual? I laughed it off as my friends gossiped about what had happened, the fact that we’d ‘had sex’ became a running joke within my friendship group. A few months on, the anger set in. I knew full well that I hadn’t wanted it to happen and I’d been utterly powerless to stop it.”
Ebel, who works in Ukraine as a freelance reporter while studying for a degree at Cambridge University, said she still suffers from feelings of anxiety after the attack.
“Even though I’ve written about it there’s always this kind of niggling fear at the back of your mind that someone is going to say that it didn’t happen and that you’re just attention seeking or you’re lying,” she said.
Reflecting on the year since she spoke out about the attack, she said it had been “very positive” and that she had received very little criticism, except for a few internet trolls. She said the criticism she had received came from other women who accused her of being “irresponsible and selfish” for not reporting the rape at the time.
Ebel said of her attacker: “We are part of the same community. The guy that did it is a mutual, no, he is a friend, or used to be a friend, and I have mutual friends with him and it’s been discussed. So what do you do then? You can’t isolate yourself from that.”
